Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society

By Leor Halevi

In his probing study of the role of death rites in the making of Islamic society, Leor Halevi imaginatively plays prescriptive texts against material culture and advances new ways of interpreting highly contested sources. His original research reveals that religious scholars of the early Islamic period produced codes of funerary law not only to define the handling of a Muslim corpse but also to transform everyday urban practices. Relying on oral traditions, these scholars established new social patterns in the cities of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean. They distinguished Islamic rites from Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian rites and changed the way men and women interacted publicly and privately.

In each chapter Halevi explores a different layer of human interaction, following the movement of the corpse from the deathbed to the grave. In the process he analyzes the real and imaginary relationships between husbands and wives, prayer leaders and mourners, and even dreamers and the dead. He describes how Muslims wailed for the deceased, prepared corpses for burial, marched in funerary processions, and prayed for the dead, highlighting the specific economic and political factors involved in these rituals as well as key religious and sexual divisions.

Offering a unique perspective on the making of Islamic social and religious ideals during this early period, Halevi forges a fascinating link between the development of funerary rites and the efforts of an emerging religion to carve out its own, distinct identity. Muhammad's Grave is a groundbreaking history of the rise of Islam and the roots of contemporary Muslim attitudes toward the body and society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9780231511933

Book preview

MUHAMMAD’S GRAVE

MUHAMMAD’S

GRAVE

Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society

Leor Halevi

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2007 Leor Halevi

Paperback edition, 2011

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51193-3

The author and the press thank the Medieval Academy of America, the College of Liberal

Arts at Texas A&M University, and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities

Research for grants supporting in part the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Halevi, Leor.

Muhammad’s grave : death rites and the making of Islamic society / Leor Halevi.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–231–13742–3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978–0–231–13743–0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978–0–231–51193–3 (e-book)

1. Islam—History. 2. Islam—Social aspects. 3. Funeral rites and ceremonies, Islamic.

4. Muḥammad, Prophet, d. 632. I. Title.

BP50.H34 2007

297.3'85—dc22

2006025614

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Map

INTRODUCTION

Funerary Traditions and the Making of Islamic Society

Tradition, Law, and Practice

CHAPTER ONE

Tombstones: Markers of Social and Religious Change, 650–800

Commemorating the Muslim Fathers

The Process of Islamization

Traditionist Opposition to Tombstones

Early Shī‘ite Versus Late Sunni Concessions

The Paradox of Islamization

CHAPTER TWO

Washing the Corpse in Arabia and Mesopotamia

Everyman’s Prophet and His Wives

Washing Corpses in Medina

The Sexual Boundary in Iraqi Law

Beautifying the Body

Islamicizing the Corpse

The Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian Contexts

CHAPTER THREE

Shrouds: Worldly Possessions in an Economy of Salvation

Remembering Mu ammad’s Shrouds After the Arab Conquests

Sources of Religious or Worldly Distinction

Family Debts

Shroud Gifts in the Age of the Caliphs

CHAPTER FOUR

Wailing for the Dead in the House of Islam

The Birth of Tragedy in al-Jāhiliyya

Reactions to a Ritual of Mourning

Padlocking the Women in Kūfa

Women in Defense of Lament

The Rise of Islam and the Question of Women

CHAPTER FIVE

Urban Processions and Communal Prayers:

Opportunities for Social, Economic, and Religious Distinction

The Urban Context: Cemeteries

Against Pomp in Processions

Ethiopian Biers for Notable Women

Muslim Participation in Jews’ or Christians’ Funerals

Communal Prayer for Imperfect Muslims

CHAPTER SIX

The Politics of Burial and Tomb Construction

The Funeral Hierarchy: Governors, Patriarchs, and Husbands

An Imam of Their Own

Gestures of Leadership, or The Imam and the Hermaphrodite

Inserting the Corpse Into the Tomb

A Prayer for God’s Slave

Low Graves Facing Mecca

The Marwanid Reconstruction of Mu ammad’s Sepulcher

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Torture of Spirit and Corpse in the Grave

The Qur’ānic al-Barzakh Between Bones and Soul

The Journey of the Spirit and the Sojourn in the Grave

Purgation or Retribution in the Grave

The Efficaciousness of Rituals and the Afterlife

EPILOGUE

Death Rites and the Process of Islamic Socialization

List of Abbreviations

Notes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Records of Material Culture

2. Primary Sources

3. Secondary Sources

Index

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Ibegan researching Islamic death rituals in Paris in the spring of 1999, wrote the first chapter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and drafts of others in Philadelphia; I revised the manuscript in College Station, Texas, and completed the book in Washington, D.C., in the winter of 2005. Over the course of researching and writing, I incurred many debts I am glad to acknowledge. In the first place, I would like to express my gratitude to my teachers, Roy Mottahedeh, Michael Cook, and Wolfhart Heinrichs. They read an early draft of this book (my doctoral dissertation), provided me with key suggestions that led me to reconsider arguments and translations, and expanded my horizons by introducing me to new sources. William Graham also served as a reader of my thesis and made many helpful comments, for which I am grateful. Everett Rowson, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, and Gerald Hawting served as the anonymous readers of the manuscript for Columbia University Press. Thanks to their generous, meticulous criticism and insightful suggestions, the revised manuscript is far better than my original submission. Throughout this book I have tried to do justice to the high standards of these seven scholars. Despite my best efforts, certain errors may remain, and for these I must claim sole responsibility.

A number of fellowships enabled me to devote several years of my life to researching in various libraries. The American Council of Learned Societies granted me the Library of Congress Fellowship in International Studies. On account of this fellowship, I was able to research Arabic manuscripts at the Library of Congress, both in the Law Library and in the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room, and to write in the supportive, intellectual environment of the John W. Kluge Center. Harvard University’s Packard Fellowship in the Humanities provided me with the necessary funding to conduct research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library and at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Thanks to the Center for the Study of World Religions, which granted me a residential fellowship, I enjoyed the recondite treasures of Harvard University’s Widener Library and the Law School Library. In addition, Harvard University and Texas A&M University supported my work with a series of modest but instrumental grants. Kindly honoring my requests, librarians at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Library and at Texas A&M University’s Evans Library acquired a number of rare or essential books. I am grateful to all of these institutions and their staff for facilitating my research.

My work benefited also from the suggestions of numerous individuals who commented critically on a draft, engaged me in a stimulating dialogue, or recommended readings that nurtured my imagination. In particular I should like to thank Eli Alshech, Terry Anderson, Peter Brown, Patricia Crone, Brian Delay, David Frankfurter, Çemal Kafadar, Hayim Lapin, Christopher Melchert, Hossein Modarressi, Harald Motzki, Maya Müller, Kevin Reinhart, Paula Sanders, Bernard Septimus, and Lennart Sundelin. I also thank the members of various writing groups at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Texas A&M, and the anonymous readers of my articles in Past & Present and History of Religions.

These articles are Wailing for the Dead: The Role of Women in Early Islamic Funerals, Past & Present 183 (2004): 3–39; and The Paradox of Islamization: Tombstone Inscriptions, Qur’anic Recitations, and the Problem of Religious Change, History of Religions 44 (2004): 120–152. I thank the Past and Present Society, Oxford University Press, and the University of Chicago Press for granting me the permission to reprint with modifications my contributions to their journals.

Christopher Graff designed the map, in consultation with me and under the guidance of the geographer Christian Brannstrom. Rob Fellman copyedited the manuscript; Robert Swanson indexed it; and Michael Haskell edited it. I thank them all for their fine work.

My editor at Columbia University Press, Wendy Lochner, has been amazingly effective in replying to my numerous queries. I thank her, also, for her enthusiasm for this project.

Lauren Clay, my wife and colleague, advised me on nearly every aspect of this book. I am most grateful for her companionship over the years, for her critical reading of two drafts, and for indulging my fascination with the rise of Islam. Our son, Joshua, has spent half of his life in Washington, D.C., away from our home in Texas, to allow me to write this book while enjoying his company. With his extrabiblical stories about the origins of the Israelites, my grandfather, Saba Bela (Benyamin Karmeli), first kindled my interest in the history of religion. I dedicate this history to his memory.

Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the Eastern Mediterranean World

INTRODUCTION

Funerary Traditions and the Making of Islamic Society

Perhaps the story should begin with an oral tradition set in the city of Medina in the year 632, moments before the death of Muḥammad’s daughter. Sensing the end of her life, after suffering in illness for several months, Fāṭima recognized the time had come to prepare for her own death and burial. So she asked Salmā, a woman in her company, to pour water for a bath. Having purified her body in a ritual ablution, Fāṭima dressed in new clothes and instructed Salmā to place her bed in the middle of the room. Fāṭima then lay down facing in the direction of the qibla, the focal point of Muslim prayers, and spoke her last words: The hour of my death has come and I have already purified myself. May no one bare my shoulder. When Fāṭima’s husband returned home, Salmā informed him of his wife’s wishes, and he complied, burying his wife without subjecting her body to the standard ritual of corpse washing.¹

In this book I examine oral traditions, like this one, in order to understand how in the first period of their history Muslims strove, in different cities in different ways, to fashion a new society that would respond to the tragedy of an individual’s death in an Islamic way. I analyze social interactions in the face of death, while describing how Muslims wailed for the dead, prepared corpses for burial, marched in funerary processions, and prayed for the deceased. I devote special attention to the Islamization of death and society, that is, to the historical process at work during the formative era of Islam, by which early Muslims endeavored to shape death rituals, as well as the social relationships at play, according to an Islamic pattern.² Though they sought to imbue persons, objects, and actions with Islamic principles, they often disagreed about just what should count as an Islamic form. They waged debates about how rituals should be performed, and by which social actors.³ Their nominal goal in these debates was to enact funerary laws consistent with the practices of Muḥammad, who also died in Medina in the year 632, and of venerable Muslim ancestors such as Fāṭima. But to the generations that lived a century or two later, it was far from clear how precisely their exemplars had died and what had happened to their bodies between death and burial. Memory itself was contested, and for good reason. At stake was the establishment of a world religion and its influence on social practices.

The oral tradition about Fāṭima’s death emerged, for instance, from vibrant discussions with far-reaching implications. Its concern with representing an Islamic, rather than a Jewish or Christian, death is made clear by reference to Fāṭima’s desire to die facing in the Muslim direction of prayer. This reference alerts one to the fact that the event, whether or not it happened, had become a meaningful description. Early Islamic thinkers in fact disagreed about the desirability of turning the dying person to face the Ka‘ba in Mecca. Sa‘īd ibn al-Musayyab (d. ca. 712), a Medinese jurist, found the practice offensive for its implication that a Muslim could die in a not-so-Islamic way. Regardless of the orientation of the body at the moment of death, he remarked, Is not the deceased a Muslim person?⁴ In addition to advocating an Islamic way of dying, the story of Fāṭima’s death made two more points. First, it effectively argued that the woman’s corpse was ritually pure, even though it had not been washed after death. It would become a point of debate whether or not deceased Muslims were, by definition, impure and therefore in need of ablution. Second, the story included the controversial proposition that Fāṭima’s husband was absent during his wife’s preparations for burial. A century or so after Fāṭima’s death, Muslims began to debate vigorously what role husbands could or could not play in preparing their wives for burial. Those who supported the notion that husbands were entitled to strip naked and wash their dead wives argued that ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Fāṭima’s husband, had, on the contrary, undertaken the ritual washing of his wife’s corpse.

My principal concern in writing this book has been to show how, in the generations after the deaths of Muḥammad and Fāṭima, Muslims tried to resolve the problem of handling a corpse and to sanction—or transform—everyday urban manners and modes of social interaction. Harking back to the ideal age of the Prophet, they struggled imaginatively over the course of the late seventh, eighth, and early ninth centuries to forge a new and lasting social pattern in the cities of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean world. The ahl al-‘ilm, a disparate group of pietists or ideologues, played a key role in this process. Traditionists and jurists, skilled as they were in memorizing or analyzing traditions about Muḥammad, formed most of this group. But it included all men and women recognized, for one or another reason, to possess knowledge of religious matters. Oral traditions, whether of novel or archaic origin, served these pietists to shape the perfect Islamic funeral.

This funeral, as well as the forms of socialization it brought into operation, came to differ significantly from the funerals and social norms of the Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians who inhabited the world of Islam. Through idealized memories of Muḥammad, Fāṭima, and other early converts to Islam, pietists sought to distinguish Islamic from non-Islamic rituals. At the same time, they made a concerted effort to change the way men and women interacted with each other in public and in private. They directed their most innovative laws to those dangerous zones where the male and female spheres of action overlapped.

To study death rites and related beliefs about the afterlife is, in some sense, to study religion at its core. As such, my humanistic, historical labor risks being misinterpreted in the current climate as a polemical or an apologetic work. It is neither. What I offer here are secular, historical interpretations of religious acts and thoughts. Sometimes I dwell on matters, such as the washing of the prophet Muḥammad’s corpse, at which delicate readers may blush. Often I turn to controversial issues: for example, the forging of oral traditions and their effect on women’s lives. I do so not to call into question Muslim belief in the soundness of any oral tradition, but to show how pietists worked to alter the behavior of women and men. Having grown up in a secular Jewish household in the Catholic city of Puebla, Mexico, I have been fascinated since childhood with the role that religion plays in the formation of social identity. In order to gain an understanding of this role, it seemed to me essential to study death rituals, for they require social action and relate to beliefs about the survival of aspects of the body and soul beyond the moment of death. Death rites have, of course, an ancient origin. We humans have been disposing of the dead with care since Cain murdered his brother, according to the Qur’ān—or for over thirty thousand years, according to paleontologists. This practice, inhumation, precedes the foundation of cities and the origins of agriculture. It stands as one of the oldest activities by which human beings have, at a very basic level, differentiated themselves from other animals. At another level, by caring for the dead in divergent ways, religious communities have over the ages elaborated distinctive cultural and social identities. In light of my personal background, it is easy to explain the motivation driving my research: a desire to understand how and indeed why an emerging monotheistic community developed culturally distinct rituals of death. Muslims knew that the practice of burial in the earth, which they shared with Jews and Christians, originated before the rise of Islam. But the pressing question for them was how to transform this and other common rituals into unique Islamic forms.

Islam, according to one of its great twentieth-century interpreters, tended to call forth a total social pattern in the name of religion itself. Muslims interested in the implementation of the Sharī‘a, the sacred law of Islam, promoted an exceedingly ambitious program of social reform to guide the practical policies of a cosmopolitan world.⁵ I see my work as delving into the early Islamic endeavor to reform multiple, yet far from all, aspects of social life at a time when the Sharī‘a was still rather fluid, though gradually freezing. Sharī‘a-minded pietists had a vested interest not only in upholding the ideal customs of the venerable ancestors (sunna), but also in influencing religious observances (‘ibādāt), the everyday practices of Muslims (‘amal), their communal relations (mu‘āmalāt), and their manners of urbane behavior (adab). All of these fields were of pressing concern to the ideologues who developed the sacred law of Islam as they set out to craft funerary practices. Yet Islam emerged in a sectarian milieu. In this environment, where Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians had already established distinctive confessional rituals, it became an essential task for Muslim ideologues to enact a funerary form that would signal the divergence of Islamic society from non-Muslim societies. Hence, their funerary laws were driven, in part, by an all-too-human drive to reach social and religious distinction.

Remarkably little scholarship exists on early Islamic death rites. This lack of work is surprising because death has drawn a number of the finest historians of the past few decades, in particular medieval Europeanists practicing social history and l’histoire des mentalités, often in dialogue with archaeology and anthropology.⁶ Scholars specializing in the study of Islam have written mainly about funerary architecture, inheritance laws, elegiac poetry, the cult of the saints, and eschatological beliefs about Paradise or Hell. Only a handful of articles exist on funerals.⁷ As the first social history of death rituals in the early Islamic period, this book seeks to contribute to the history of death, the history of Muslim rituals, and, perhaps most important, to the emerging field of Islamic social history.⁸

Early Islamic traditions concerning the funerals and everyday practices of Muḥammad and his companions promise to provide the building blocks for a new social history. Traditionists, who collected and promoted these traditions, were socially concerned with death rituals, for three reasons. Death appeared to them as a key moment of transition in social life, making it necessary to enact a number of rituals designed ultimately to separate the deceased individual from the community of the living. In addition, funerals often attracted large crowds, and the potential in this context for unruly behavior and emotional outbursts called for the imposition of an Islamic social order. Finally, the rituals ranging from the washing of the corpse in a dark chamber to the interment in the cemetery at the edge of the city required different kinds of social actors to work in public grounds or domestic settings. Such diverse situations provoked fascinating discussions on a wide array of social issues. Traditionists and jurists addressed the right of a caliph to lead the congregation in a funerary prayer, the use of candles in the funerals of the rich, the disposal of non-Muslim corpses, and the precise nature of the relationship between husband and wife at the moment of death. On the basis of such discussions, this history addresses economic and political factors at work in the making of Islamic society, as well as religious and sexual divisions.

Tradition, Law, and Practice

To write this history, I researched various kinds of evidence, ranging from archaeological reports on pre-Islamic burials to theological tracts about the afterlife, and from early Arabic poems of lament to obituaries of famous women and men. I analyzed objects of material culture, shrouds and tombstones in particular, that communicate a very different idea of Islam than do legal sources.⁹ I turned to Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian sources, so as to present the rise of Islam in a comparative context. Vendīdād, a book of the Zend-Avesta that concerns the matter of purity and pollution in relation to human corpses; Sema ot, a minor Talmudic tractate devoted to mourning; and various Eastern Christian canons serve to establish non-Muslim funerary laws and practices. Yet this study relies especially on oral traditions and legal rulings about death rituals.

Collections of sacred law in the genres of adīth, or Oral Tradition, and Fiqh, or Jurisprudence, generally include a chapter or book entitled The Book on Funerary Practice (Kitāb al-Janā’iz). These chapters or books differ from each other in content, focus, and style, although they tend to cover similar topics. Thus, most of these books include a section on burial attire in which they relate a story about the shrouds of Muḥammad. The story itself varies from book to book, as no agreement existed about what garments Muḥammad had worn to the grave. What also tends to vary—sometimes slightly, sometimes significantly—are the conclusions drawn on the basis of an anecdote. In early Islamic sources, differences of opinion often reflected either individual proclivities or local agendas. In funerary traditions, we find evidence mostly for the positions of traditionists from two Arabian cities, Mecca and Medina, and two Mesopotamian cities, Kūfa and Baṣra. Other important cities of the early Islamic world, such as Ṣan‘ā’, Damascus, Ḥimṣ (Homs), and Fusṭāṭ, are not as well represented. In postclassical sources, differences of opinion tend to follow institutionalized divisions based on the teachings of a school of law or a sect. Islam became divided into three major branches—the Sunni, the Shī‘ite, and the Khārijite—with each branch undergoing further division. Thus, we have four major Sunni schools of law (Mālikites, Ḥanafites, Shāfi‘ites, and Ḥanbalites), three main Shī‘ite sects (Zaydis, Ismā‘īlis, and Twelvers), and three main Khārijite sects (though only the Ibāḍis matter for our purposes).

The two genres of adīth and Fiqh were closely interrelated, particularly in the earliest writings. Technically speaking, a work in the first genre should be simply a repository of oral traditions, whereas a work in the second genre should consist of disciplined judgments issued in relation to oral traditions, Qur’ānic dicta, and local practices. It is not entirely clear, however, how to categorize the Muwa a’ of Malik ibn Anas (d. 795). It contains traditions and legal rulings, but should not count as an interdisciplinary work, for it was dictated before the lines between the two genres were clearly drawn. The lines would remain blurry even in the ninth century. Collectors of traditions tended to select sayings with a prescriptive eye, often grouping them under subheadings that reflected their own legal interpretations. Jurists, for their part, frequently issued laws that derived directly from traditions, without bothering to explain the hermeneutics in play.

To interpret oral traditions for the purposes of historical reconstruction presents a special and exciting challenge. The sources are prescriptive in nature, making it difficult to measure the distance between religious ideal and mundane reality; they tend, furthermore, to defy the historicist goal of determining time and place of origin. Only in rare cases can historians agree on the dating of an oral tradition: apocalyptic traditions predicting events with a high degree of specificity obviously originated at some point after the actual events. Most often, however, it is impossible to localize traditions with precision in time and space.¹⁰

Most traditions about Muḥammad’s works and sayings emerged at some point between the early seventh century, during the Prophet’s lifetime, and the late ninth century. Ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855), al-Bukhārī (d. 870), Muslim (d. 875), Ibn Māja (d. 887), Abū Dā’ūd (d. 889), and al-Tirmidhī (d. 892) transcribed thousands of oral traditions in standard, eventually canonized, collections. There exist also earlier works that contain oral traditions. Attributed to Zayd ibn ‘Alī (d. 740), Ibn Isḥāq (d. 767), al-Rabī‘ ibn Ḥabīb (d. ca. 790), Mālik ibn Anas (d. 795), Abū Ghānim Bishr (d. ca. 815), and ‘Abd al-Razzāq (d. 827), these works are of great importance to historians of the making of Islam. The bulk of traditions in these collections circulated orally before they were written down. Focusing on early collections and researching in a technical way the formal processes by which oral traditions were transmitted from one or a few to several authorities, source critics have recently been favoring the late seventh and early eighth centuries as the most significant period in the movement toward memorialization. They have tried to establish that in many cases Muslims genuinely transmitted traditions dating from this period, if not from an earlier time, while acknowledging that over the course of the eighth century Muslims sometimes invented or embellished oral traditions.¹¹ Still, we continue to face a gap of several generations between the lifetime of Muḥammad and the period when the formal transmission of oral traditions began. It is one thing to offer a plausible history of the transmission of an anecdote from the late seventh to the early ninth century, and quite another thing to establish its historicity. Frequently, we cannot know with certainty whether an oral tradition reflects a real event from early seventh-century Medina, for example, or a forgery originating in eighth-century Baṣra. Historians dealing with the adīth must always be aware of the possibility of deliberate ascription and purposeful misrepresentation. In fairly obvious cases, we can ascertain bias in a tradition and discount it as spurious. In other cases, we have no grounds on which to consider a tradition as genuine simply because we find no reason to suspect it. Traditions were forged for reasons unknown.¹²

Due to the time gap between alleged event and written commemoration, and due to the fact that oral traditions often contradict one another, historians of early Islam have questioned the reliability of these sources and their worth in historical inquiry. Scholars have approached the Oral Tradition with markedly different attitudes, ranging from apologetic defensiveness to secular irreverence. They have developed distinct methodological approaches, sharpened by debates held during the past three decades.¹³ Instead of summarizing the contributions of individual scholars from various camps, I should like to highlight the tendencies that help to clarify my own perspective. An empirically minded skeptical revisionist has argued that the components of the Islamic tradition are secondary constructions, the history of which we are not invited to pursue: they simply have to be discarded. History should be based not on traditions of uncertain historicity but on harder facts: coins and monumental inscriptions that offer material and datable evidence, external documents that attest to the formation of Islam without the kind of bias inherent in internal Muslim accounts, and forged traditions that originated outside of Arabia. On this basis, skeptical revisionists have written histories that bear little resemblance to early Muslim narratives of the origins of Islam and diverge deliberately from mildly skeptical accounts.¹⁴ I have benefited from many of their methodological insights, yet I differ from them by my efforts to relate oral traditions of indeterminable historicity to a historical process that unfolded in both Arabia and Mesopotamia.

Another alternative to the approach of skeptical empiricists presents history not as a discipline based exclusively on verifiable events but as a gamble on probabilities, the object of which is to select judiciously those reports that seemed most reliable due to their apparent lack of political or theological bias. The historian interpreting sources from this perspective tends to dismiss legendary stories and to recast polemical material. By no means does he simply reproduce the traditional narrative of the rise of an Islamic polity. Instead, he reassesses disputes and grievances over succession to the caliphate. He rehabilitates certain leaders and illustrates with colorful anecdotes their appeal and their power. A work of history written from this angle often seems persuasive.¹⁵ But it fails to heed the lessons of skeptical empiricism by constructing a narrative of events that might never have occurred on the basis of traditions that may contain undetected biases.

Moving beyond this approach, with its relatively straightforward dichotomy between fact and fiction, literary-minded scholars have written about the idealization of the life of Muḥammad and of his wife ‘Ā’isha, and about the fictionalization of certain events, such as the plague pandemic of 541 to 749. There is in this scholarship, loosely affiliated with the critical aims of new historicism or cultural poetics, no elusive search for that kernel of historical truth supposedly hidden in legendary texts. The aim is to read texts, including oral traditions, as literary products of early Islamic culture. With this perspective comes a shift away from the questions, so beloved by source critics, about the origins and authenticity of the Muslim tradition.¹⁶ Adopting this perspective, historians can begin to focus not on the obscure origins of an oral tradition but on its destination. This can be determined because an oral tradition consists of two parts: a report on an ancient event normally accompanied by a saying of Muḥammad’s (matn) and a chain of authorities lending support to the oral transmission from generation to generation (isnād). On the basis of this account of oral transmission, researchers can establish with fair confidence the local context where a cluster of traditions about a specific topic circulated.¹⁷ In this way, one can sometimes discover that it was principally traditionists from one particular region who related a certain story about an act of Muḥammad’s. Such a discovery will shed light neither on the purported event nor on the first instance when the story was told. But it will show where, eventually, a group of individuals commemorated the story, and thus give insight into the geography of social practice.

While building on this scholarship, this book takes a new path, by concentrating on the ideological agenda of the transmitters who advocated oral traditions and on the relevance of their remembrances within a particular environment. It rarely matters, from the perspective of a historian of culture and society, whether a collective memory of Muḥammad’s age was sound or contrived. What is important, I would argue, is to reach an understanding of the social function of this memory within a society experiencing rapid change. Accordingly, the title of this work, Muhammad’s Grave, refers not literally to the Prophet’s sepulcher in Medina, but metaphorically to the very concrete ways by which the remembrance of Muḥammad affected the practices of Muslims after his death. Oral traditions about his death and burial played a special role in Muslim societies long after 632. These traditions, which represented rituals mimetically and with a high degree of realism, corresponded to the ritual actions that Muslims, who had an affinity for memories of Muḥammad, repeatedly performed. They served either to reinforce practices that resembled closely an ideal ritual form or to criticize those that did not.¹⁸ One way or the other, these traditions formed part of an ideological discourse on everyday life. As such, they reflect the mentalité of traditionists and reveal, though imperfectly, their social and cultural milieu.

This position does not imply any simple correspondence between the actual rituals of the traditionist milieu and the rituals depicted in the Oral Tradition. The rituals traditionists observed or participated in had an influence on the oral traditions they transmitted. They tended to select, and frequently to relate, traditions that had some bearing on their local practices, and surely in certain cases some of them succumbed to the temptation to remember—really, to imagine—a ritual from the age of Muḥammad that resonated with their present concerns. At the same time, we should be aware of the force of these traditions once they became accepted as authoritative. Insofar as pietists managed to persuade Muslims to follow their directives, these traditions had a certain social effect and cultural impact. That said, it is in most cases impossible to measure when, where, and precisely how an oral tradition affected ritual practice.¹⁹

The relationship between ideal and practice was thus complex. Yet several historians of gender and of Islamic law have portrayed it in rather narrow terms. Positing too extensive a separation between discourse and practice, they have called into question, by implication if not deliberately, the very possibility of writing on the basis of legal literature a social history in which gender figures as a key category of analysis. Islamic law did not grow out of practice, argued an expert on the origins of Islamic jurisprudence, it came into being as the expression of a religious ideal in opposition to it.²⁰ Perhaps under the influence of this formulation, a historian of gender warned against the use of the sacred law of Islam for the purposes of social history: Islamic literature does not offer a descriptive account of how things happened. Essentially prescriptive in nature, it reflects the normative gender system that existed in the minds of an urban male educated elite, not the lived experiences of men as men and women as women. Historians ought to handle these sources as a form of discourse about gender that reveals vested interest rather than records actual practice. Most historians now agree, she concluded, that the study of these texts should not be confused with the study of historical society.²¹

Early Islamic funerary law was, of course, prescriptive, and it includes many rules against practices that traditionists despised, such as wailing for the dead and inscribing tombstones. Laws of this kind did not come into being in a mental vacuum—they arose in opposition to underlying practices. Jurists alongside traditionists decried novel practices and celebrated ancestral ones, revealing in the process much about the usages of Muslims. Jurists also worked to accommodate local customs that emerged outside of Arabia and became issues of legal concern after Muḥammad’s death. Frequently, their aim was to describe in elaborate and chilling detail how to conduct a certain ritual, whether of Arabian origin or not: how to squeeze a corpse’s bowels, for example, or how to braid a corpse’s hair. By and large, laws of this kind were intended as practical instructions for actual use. Thus we should describe Islamic funerary law as partly adaptive and partly reactive. Adaptive and reactive laws that derived from close observation of ritual practices must count as socially descriptive despite their legally prescriptive quality.

The Oral Tradition, for the most part transcribed and censored by men, does contain sayings demeaning women.²² This fact has influenced historians of gender in their evaluation of the genre. In this discourse, they have argued, women tend to appear as distant reflections of historical personages because male authors reconstructed women’s lives and sayings in multiple, often contradictory representations.²³ There is, however, little justification for viewing the Oral Tradition as a male discourse far removed from the experiences of women. Men compiled the books of Oral Tradition, to be sure, yet many of the transmitters of oral traditions were actually women.²⁴ In addition, men indirectly reported women’s words and their works, even if in a negative light. We must learn to read against the grain, so that the early Islamic world will not appear as if populated exclusively by legal-minded men. Impoverished widows, wailers for the dead, shroud weavers, gravediggers, and corpse washers all participated in the making of early Islamic society, though they obviously did less than traditionists and jurists to shape the discourse. The funerary traditions examined in this book will reveal, more than the imaginary world of lawmakers, quotidian realities.

The legal sources reflect the viewpoint of townsmen—not of nomads, holy warriors, or rural people who died outside of the Islamic oecumene. This concentration on urban life offers an advantage. It helps highlight how the process of Islamic socialization unfolded differently in different cities. A focus on cities enables this book to convey how the civilization of Islam changed as its center of gravity shifted away from Mecca and Medina, the Prophet’s cities in Arabia, to the booming garrison cities established by the Arab conquerors in Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean world.

In the early Islamic world, as elsewhere, different facets of human existence succumbed to change at different times and according to different rhythms. Transformations in public and in private rituals did not coincide. Some things changed not at all or imperceptibly. Though traditionists were surprisingly realistic in their goals, they sometimes failed to achieve them, as will become clear once we turn to their attempt to convert the emotions of women to an Islamic standard. Still, this book shows that significant changes in the process of Islamicizing death occurred during the long eighth century, with the period between the last decade of the seventh century and the third decade of the eighth century forming a great watershed.

But the turning points in this process varied geographically. Arguing against jurists who supported the practices of their own cities, the jurist Mālik apparently advocated the current practice of his city, Medina, as if it preserved the ideal tradition revealed by God’s Messenger to the first community of Muslims.²⁵ We cannot be sure of this presumption of continuity. Medina, like Mecca, experienced social and economic upheaval as a result of the Arab conquests and the triumph of Islam. But it is easy to understand why pietists from the cities of Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean world often visited the cities of Muḥammad in Arabia, where they hoped to discover the true Islamic form. Yet they might have paid closer attention to exciting developments back home. For it was in the new garrison cities, particularly in Baṣra and Kūfa, that profound ritual—and consequently social—transformation first occurred. These cities gathered a mixed population of Arabian immigrants, including retired conquerors with their mothers and wives, new converts, and Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians seeking opportunity in the new centers of power. Here one could sense the vigor and exuberance, even a certain nervous agitation, that accompanied the mingling of populations in an era of religious change. Islam was then but a young religion. Its civilizing mission still unfinished, the pietists from Baṣra and Kūfa were most anxious for its realization.²⁶

Each chapter of this history explores a different layer of human interaction, ranging from family relations around the deathbed to imaginary relationships between dreamers and the dead. The generous reader who will exercise his or her imagination may come to see a society in motion—first in domestic settings and on public grounds, ultimately in imaginary spaces. The pungent smell of camphor rising from the corpse of a Medinese wife; the vengeful, piercing sound of women lamenting a warrior’s death; the sight of wild-haired angels prying a man’s soul out of his toenails—all of these are glimpses of the distant world I have endeavored to resurrect. May it come to life now.

CHAPTER ONE

Tombstones

Markers of Social and Religious Change, 650–800

Twenty or so years after the death of the prophet Muḥammad in 632, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Khayr passed away. His name does not appear in the annals of history and, but for an extraordinary record of his death, memory of his existence would have been altogether lost. His tombstone, once hailed as the oldest known monument in the Islamic world, entreats the reader to ask for God’s forgiveness:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, this grave belongs to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Khayr al-Ḥajrī.

Forgive him, O God, and make him enter [Paradise] by your mercy, and let us go with him.

Seek forgiveness for him whenever this inscription is read, and say Amen!

This inscription was written in Jumādā II of the year 31 [January or February of the year 652 CE].¹

One overly enthusiastic skeptic has questioned the antiquity of this tombstone by suggesting—mistakenly—that even if the date intended were 131 AH, it would still be the earliest tombstone in Arabic.² Actually, several tombstones bear dates prior to 131 AH (749 CE), and there is no good reason to doubt the date of 31 AH, written in stone.³ The important objection to consider concerns not the date of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s tombstone, but its categorization as an Islamic monument. If the objective is to say something meaningful about the making of Islam, we must wonder how justifiable it is to label this tombstone Islamic. It refers to Allāh explicitly and to the Hijrī calendar implicitly, but contains no reference to the prophet Muḥammad and no allusion to Muslim scripture. It records the death of a believer in Allah, but otherwise lacks a distinctively Islamic identity. Its plea for divine forgiveness in the afterlife was commonplace in Jewish and Christian tombstones from late antiquity, and it is by no means clear that the inscriber’s intention was to produce a uniquely Islamic—rather than, more generally, a monotheistic—memorial.⁴

Islamic markers, such as prayers for the prophet Muḥammad and quotations from the Qur’ān, emerged in epitaphs in the period between 690 and 720, and it was only by the 790s, as this chapter will show, that a formulaic pattern became established, including a standardized confession of faith. These changes in the tombstone record reflect a gradual process of Islamization. To witness such a process unfolding is an exciting matter for a historian, especially due to the scarcity of datable documents from the first two centuries of the Islamic era. This process of religious change, though widely rooted, became controversial in some circles. Upholders of tradition, pietistic ideologues from the eighth century, began actively to oppose the popular practice of inscribing tombstones. Despite the fact that the epitaphs contained pious religious sentiments, traditionists decried the practice as a blameworthy innovation that violated the customs of Medina, the city in Arabia where God had revealed the new religion to the prophet Muḥammad.

In this chapter, changes in the tombstone record from the first two centuries of Islam will be examined alongside the traditionist literature directed against tombstones. Analyzing this record, which historians of early Islam have largely overlooked, is in and of itself worthwhile for several reasons.⁵ First, tombstones hint at the changing role of the Qur’ān in the religion of early Islam. Qur’ānic quotations are first attested on tombstone inscriptions from the first quarter of the eighth century; by the end of that century, tombstones begin to display fairly elaborate quotations. They reveal a facet of an emerging ritual, that of reciting scripture in a ceremony of intercession for the dead. This is a practice about which early Islamic literature has remarkably little to say. Given how limited our knowledge is about the emergence of a Qur’ānic liturgy in the formative period of Islam, this documentary evidence is significant.

Second, dated tombstone inscriptions provide an independent record of religious trends, suggesting an alternative standard for periodization to the chronology followed by historians of the early Islamic polity. In the context of political narrative, it makes sense to adopt the year 750, when the ‘Abbasids overthrew the Marwanid dynasty from power, as a revolutionary turning point. But this date has no significance in the tombstone record, which suggests that key changes in the practice of Islam occurred at other times, irrespectively of political developments, around the years 691, 721, and 795. Before proceeding with this alternative chronology, a caveat on the limitations of the evidence must be considered. Dated tombstone inscriptions from this early period come primarily from the lands of Egypt. In recent years, epigraphists have begun collecting inscriptions from various other sites in the eastern Mediterranean world and from the Arabian peninsula, but so far, most of their discoveries date from a later period, beginning circa 850.⁶ As a result, the tombstones to be analyzed reflect primarily changes in the practice of Islam in early Islamic Egypt. In this connection, it is also worth stating the obvious: this history is based on tombstones already discovered. New discoveries may alter in ways minor or significant the chronology to be developed below.

Beyond these two contributions, an examination of the epitaphs in conjunction with the relevant traditionist literature will offer the opportunity to see how traditionists reacted to an emerging popular practice. It could be argued that tombstones and tombstone inscriptions, if prohibitively expensive for the poor and relatively incomprehensible to the illiterate, were part of elite rather than of popular practice. But popular in this chapter simply refers to practices that were relatively widespread in social and geographic terms. Traditionists did not uniformly oppose such practices; they readily approved of usages that followed or seemed to follow their prescriptions. Yet they despised any deviation from the customs they sanctioned and, in the name of tradition, decried new practices as contemptible innovations. Accordingly, the focus at the end of this chapter will be on the emergence of a productive tension between traditionism and a popular Muslim practice. This tension led not only to the development of the reactive mentality that came in part to characterize traditionist Islam, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the formation of an alternative religiosity.⁷

Commemorating the Muslim Fathers

Before proceeding with the process of Islamization as it unfolded in view of dated epitaphs, let us first characterize early Muslim tombstones in light of non-Muslim ones. This examination will serve to highlight a significant social transition toward the commemoration of individuals and their paternal kin. Seventh-and eighth-century Muslims rarely emerge from their tombstones with an individual profile. We learn from these documents the name of a certain Muslim, his or her sex and parentage, and often, the date of death. Occasionally, we can determine the social and economic status of the deceased, when his or her last name (i.e., nisba) denotes a professional occupation. But the essential questions that might occur to us about the age reached before death and the cause of death, the main accomplishments of the person, surviving spouses or children, desires fulfilled or unfulfilled, are typically left unanswered, as in ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s tombstone. Sometimes, a medieval tombstone will boast a geometric design, witticism, or charming poem.⁸ By contrast, the earliest Islamic tombstones express a religion both austere and iconoclastic. Principally, what Muslims cared to commemorate in these monuments was their own personal, confessional affiliation to Islam.

In terms of kinship, early Muslim tombstones record patrilineal descent. We learn the names of fathers, grandfathers, and even great-grandfathers—rarely do we learn of mothers, grandmothers, or other relations.⁹ The seventh-century tombstone of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Khayr displays only one patrilineal link. (Ibn means son of.) Late eighth-century tombstones frequently memorialize three and even four generations of male links, as in the cases of Rabī‘a ibn Maslama ibn Ḥunāṭa al-Ṣadafī (d. 795) and of Ibrāhīm ibn Hishām ibn Bakr ibn Abī ‘Uthmān (d. 799).¹⁰ By emphasizing paternal descent to such a degree, early Muslims distinguished themselves from Jews, from Christians, and from pre-Islamic Arabs.

To illustrate the significance of this commemoration of male ancestors, let us examine selectively several non-Muslim tombstones, beginning with the epitaphs of three Jews who died before the rise of Islam. The tombstone of Arsinoé, a Hellenized Jewish woman, identifies her as the daughter of Theodosios, yet also records that she died at age twenty, that she married, and that she left no descendants. Theophila commissioned the epitaph of her husband, Dosas, dead at age eighteen. The tombstone of Machaon, son of Sabbathaios, tells us the boy died at age five, and that his mother, Philoumene, has become depressed.¹¹ All three monuments memorialize various kinds of family ties, stressing bonds between husband and wife, father and daughter, or mother and son.

Christian Coptic tombstones similarly display ties to various members of the family, not only to fathers. We learn that Troisis, who died in the year 741, was the wife of Parashe. (The epitaph does not mention her father’s name.) Another eighth-century tombstone laments death in bitter terms for severing fathers from their children. It continues:

Let all who love to weep for their dead come to this place and mourn greatly on account of the wretchedness of my childhood.

I Ioḥannes the deacon passed through it when my mother was a widow. I went to the city of Kōs. I died in that place, and they laid me in this tomb.

Remember me.

And the monks, as one can only expect, tended to commemorate ties to their brothers.¹²

Was emphasis on male ancestors the norm in pre-Islamic Arab societies? Did the early Muslims import this Arabian sense of kinship to the lands they conquered? The answer to these questions cannot be a simple yes or no. A marked cleavage is easily noticeable, however, when pre-Islamic and early Islamic tombstones are compared. There are a few striking pre-Islamic examples. First, a recently discovered South Arabian tombstone (a Hasaean inscription from Thāj) commemorates a matrilineal line! There is no mention of a male ancestor as it traces the descent of Ghadhiyat, daughter of Malkat,